Our website uses cookies to improve your user experience. If you continue browsing, we assume that you consent to our use of cookies. More information can be found in our Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy.

Challenges from next-generation URL Shorteners

Digg recently released a URL shortener that doesn’t take customers to your website. It wraps your website in a Digg frame instead. This presents a number of challenges.

It isn’t just Digg that uses this technique. HootSuite, a platform which allows companies to manage Twitter profiles, offers ow.ly as a URL shortener that behaves in the same way.

Traffic powerhouse StumbleUpon is close to releasing su.pr which may well also make use of the frame-wrapping technique.

So what are the challenges?

Analytics

Analytics gets hit hard. The main victim is the important referral stat. These next-generation URL shorteners obscure where the traffic to your site is coming from. Since the digg.com URL shortener wraps your site in a digg.com frame it is always digg.com that is seen to be requesting your site.

As a result traffic might be coming from Twitter.com, a competitor’s site, an affiliate or even Digg but the referring site will always be credited as Digg.com by many analytic solutions.

In fact, it may appear as if digg.com is driving traffic to your site without the site ever actually being submitted to digg.com. If your social media campaign is using referrals from social sites as a metric then this is a curveball.

Affiliates

Most affiliate terms and conditions prohibit affiliates from wrapping merchant sites in frames. This is done for brand protection reasons, especially to prevent the affiliate from passing off a look-a-like domain as actually being your site.

The frame-based URL shortener may not always display the URL or the full URL of the site being pointed to. For example, an Ow.ly link for bigmouthmedia describes the URL as being http://www.bigmouthmed… and the rest of the address is obscured.

This URL obfuscation means that affiliate tracking codes might be passed around as the short URL is shared. In fact, when the next generation URL shortener is combined with a site like Digg then it is possible a large amount of traffic will be driven to your site in such a way that the affiliate benefits.

It’s worth noting that many forms of affiliate tracking will be immediately visible if the shortener shows any of the “long” URL at all.

Search

The frame style of URL shortener isn’t particularly good news for an SEO campaign either. The best of the first generation of URL shorteners are kind enough to issue a 301 redirect from themselves to the original “long” URL.

If a link from a trusted site to another site counts as a vote from the trusted site to the other then the 301 redirect ensures that as much of that vote passes through the URL shortener and to the intended site as possible. Google requests 301 redirects are used in situations like this.

This is not the case when the URL shortener wraps the target site in a frame. In this scenario the worth of link is not passed through to the target site – it stays with the URL shortener.

Recommended

Management Today editor Matthew Gwyther is the latest print media veteran to stick the boot into Twitter, labelling it “a tedious fad we would do well to pull the plug on”.

He lambasts the “news editors at the national newspapers” for wading into Twitter without adequate resources “to do it properly”, while accusing them of being “desperate to keep up with the Joneses”.

“The result is an unwholesome mess – a garbled Babel of nonsense that leaves you screaming for a return to the times when we could read all about it the day afterwards over our Cornflakes on a page of newsprint.”

Word to Matthew: you can read it afterwards! You don’t have to tune in to Twitter! It will all become clear the next day.

But there’s a place for Twitter – and a place for real time reporting too…

A growing number of charities and non-profits have gone social. From Facebook to Twitter, social media has an obvious appeal: the costs of getting involved are low, awareness can be generated virally and people naturally tend to use social media to engage around topics and causes that are important to them.

But what isn’t so well understood is how social media can best be applied to the non-profit sector in meaningful ways.

Companies are pouring billions of dollars a year into social media and influencer marketing campaigns, many of which target consumers on Facebook-owned Instagram, in an effort to parlay social engagement into sales.